Insert coin: a look back at our favorite classic arcade games

You young'uns need to learn your history!

You kids today don't know what real gaming is. You talk about your Call of Honors and Gears of Halos like it was spun gold coming straight from God's butt. Back inour day, there were real games... inventive, crazy, hard games that charged a quarter for each play and made you stand up in front of a giant wooden cabinet as you played. And we had to walk fifteen miles in the snow to play 'em. Uphill! Both ways!

Wait! Come back here, you whippersnappers. This is important. You're going to sit here and you're going to let us regale you with tales and videos of what made the golden age of arcades so special, or so help me I will throw that WiiStation 360 of yours right out the window, dagnabbit.

Bad Dudes vs. DragonNinja

Best game for making president Reagan seem coolPublisher: Data EastYear: 1988

"President Ronnie has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue Ronnie?" Not sure? What if I told you the president will offer to "go out for a burger" with you if you're successful? That's what I thought. LET'S DO THIS! —Andrew Cunningham

Burger Time

Best cure for the munchiesPublisher: Data EastYear: 1982

Conceptually, this game is just brilliant; scrambling to build your burgers while being chased by sausages and a fried egg is like a fry cook's grease-fueled nightmare. As is the norm for games from that era, it's also freaking hard; don't expect to master it overnight. It truly has held up very well, though. It has that magic combination of challenge, rhythm, and that "one more try" appeal that still makes it worth plunking down some quarters for. —Aurich Lawson

Contra

Best game you probably didn't know was an arcade game firstPublisher: KonamiYear: 1987

Most people probably know Contra from the NES port, along with the now-infamous Konami code to get 30 lives. What you might not know if you've never played the original is that the arcade version used a vertical monitor orientation, making for a very different feel with a much taller playing field. —Aurich Lawson

Crazy Climber

Best human fly simulatorPublisher: TaitoYear:1980

With dual joysticks and no buttons, this game controlled like no other. You have to dodge closing windows, falling plants, King Kong, electrical wires, and even bird poop. If you pause too long, you hear "Go for it!" The biggest problem in the arcade was joystick damage from overzealous play. —Eric Bangeman

Donkey Kong Jr.

Best reversal of expectations in a sequelPublisher: NintendoYear: 1982

Wait, suddenly Mario is evil and Donkey Kong is good... what has the world come to? This could have been a boring, derivative game after the success of the first Donkey Kong, but the climbing mechanics and different levels were well executed. —Eric Bangeman

My favorite was this kind of SciFi Tank game, where you collected coins, and then could buy effects, bombs, shields and all that, had two handles to contro the tank's tracks individually...fuck I forgot the name.....you were able to play that one in CoOp too..

Star Castle, anyone? I must have spent more money on that one than on any other game of the era.

Oh, and as a purely theoretical observation: many stores in Sweden already had automatic empty bottle refund counting machines — you put in your empties and got a receipt, then took the receipt to the cashier for coins. Coins which magically fit the arcade machines just a few meters away. Collecting empty beer bottles at the nearby park was a good way to finance your gaming addiction when you were about 11 years old.

But this one store also had a machine for the beer crates. So what you — completely theoretically — could do was to liberate a beer crate in the drinks section by removing the bottles, shove the crate through the machine, and get enough money to play for an hour or more. Theoretically, of course.

Just a small plug: if you're ever in Rochester, ny, the kids' museum here has nearly all these, including the original arcade cabinet lunar landing, also an amazing display of videogame collectibles from the console world, like the NES style mini-gameboy and the wonderswan, colecos, etc. It's an amazing way to spend an afternoon. My son, all of 5 years old, got hooked on the cheesy old Xmen game that way. And I discovered that the original Tron game was better experienced in the 80s. Just like the movie, actually.

Good to see Robotron 2084 in the list. I guess you didn't want to fill it with Eugene Jarvis / Williams games, but they had a serious golden patch back in the day. Like dp2 I'd have Bubble Bobble in my list. I'd also prefer SFII to MK, but it's true that Subzero's final spinal was iconic. No into the screen driving games seems an omission: OutRun was an absolute classic and blew the competition out of the water in 1986. Magical Sound Shower 4EVA!

A question and a reflection: At the time, each single game cost you serious money. At the same time, the games were not exactly shy about killing you either. That was a recipe for success.

Today we have more and more free-to-play games (*cough* Zynga *cough*) that cost you nothing, and really do not allow you to fail. With a typical game of the genre, you could have your cat walkback and forth across your keyboard and you'll still find you're progressing in the game. As a result you have "games" that people play mostly out of a sense of obligation, not for enjoyment.

So, is serious dying important? Where is the optimal point? And does that point shift by medium? Nethack and Dwarf Fortress are as popular as ever despite their uncompromising attitude towards failure. They're of course catering ot a fairly marginal audience, but I suspect the death thing is not the reason. Casual games with real consequences for failure and no way to buy your way ahead could well be a winning concept.

Excellent trip to the local arcade(s)! We had about 5 when I was growing up, and we went to certain ones depending on which games we wanted to play. I played almost all of these in the arcade. Thanks!

The ones that I remember that didn't make your list: Wizard of War, Space Duel, Battlezone (sucked, but 3D!!!). Rastan was a bit later, but also great, and Xenophobe! And who can forget Outrun with the user selected music track and path choices? I wasted a lot of quarters. The rest I spent at the arcade.

A question and a reflection: At the time, each single game cost you serious money. At the same time, the games were not exactly shy about killing you either. That was a recipe for success.

Except that it wasn't, at least not in North America. Most arcades were not exactly laughing and rolling about in their Uncle Scrooge-style money bins. It was a geek niche with a few standouts.

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Today we have more and more free-to-play games (*cough* Zynga *cough*) that cost you nothing, and really do not allow you to fail. With a typical game of the genre, you could have your cat walkback and forth across your keyboard and you'll still find you're progressing in the game. As a result you have "games" that people play mostly out of a sense of obligation, not for enjoyment.

Except that those Zynga and Popcap games, as ridiculous as they may seem to hardcore gamers, are making huge amounts of money because anyone can play them for as long a time or as short a time as they choose. The audience is no longer limited to just a dedicated few with a lot of time on their hands.

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So, is serious dying important? Where is the optimal point? And does that point shift by medium? Nethack and Dwarf Fortress are as popular as ever despite their uncompromising attitude towards failure. They're of course catering ot a fairly marginal audience, but I suspect the death thing is not the reason. Casual games with real consequences for failure and no way to buy your way ahead could well be a winning concept.

Again, you're talking about niche games here. Nethack and Dwarf Fortress are popular among a very narrow geek subset. They are not widely accepted, and many people find the price for failure to be far too high for them to choose to spend their extremely limited gaming time on them - assuming they've heard of the game at all.

The key to success for casual, free-to-play games is accessibility and the illusion of reaching goals. If you permanently kill a character for every mistake or bad roll of the dice (ala Nethack), you'll drive away most of your players.

Blizzard discovered this in World of Warcraft when they tried to roll back many of the casual-friendly changes they made in Wrath of the Lich King in order to make Cataclysm more challenging. Instead, they ended up seeing a net loss of players for the first time since the game was released seven years ago. With Mists of Pandaria, they've admitted to the mistake of moving away from casual accessibility and are working hard to provide more end-game choices for casuals.

Make no mistake - appealing to widest possible crowd is a science, and one that F2P developers like Zynga have invested heavily into researching.

No mention of Time Killers? A friend and I discovered it during a stop at a laundromat during a road trip back in the day (he got car sick so we had to stop and clean the car and his clothes). We played it straight for about 2 hours, it was a blast.

My favorite was this kind of SciFi Tank game, where you collected coins, and then could buy effects, bombs, shields and all that, had two handles to contro the tank's tracks individually...fuck I forgot the name.....you were able to play that one in CoOp too..

Today we have more and more free-to-play games (*cough* Zynga *cough*) that cost you nothing, and really do not allow you to fail. With a typical game of the genre, you could have your cat walkback and forth across your keyboard and you'll still find you're progressing in the game. As a result you have "games" that people play mostly out of a sense of obligation, not for enjoyment.

Is there not something about them providing just enough positive feedback that people get a sense of accomplishment?

Two of my favorites to play in the arcade were Dig Dug and Sinistar. I liked Dig Dug mostly because of the joy that came with filling up monsters with air until they popped.

Sinistar was just a totally badass game. The C64 game that came out later that had a somewhat similar style of gameplay, but in a completely different setting, was Raid on Bungeling Bay, which I think was Will Wright's first commercial game.